


Important

by songwithnosoul



Category: Girl Genius
Genre: F/M, Gen, also warning for attempted reproductive coercion, but it also turned out to be about siblings too, the castle wants heirs already, this is a story about aromanticism, which is cool
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-25
Updated: 2016-06-25
Packaged: 2018-07-18 02:07:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,555
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7295218
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/songwithnosoul/pseuds/songwithnosoul
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Barry has always known that "normal" isn't possible for a Heterodyne, but he takes comfort in solidarity with his brother, Bill. It's another thing entirely to realize that some of his differences are ones that Bill doesn't share.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Important

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Aggressively Arospec Week.

Barry Heterodyne has never expected to be normal. Normal is supposed to be beneath a Heterodyne - even if he’s never quite been told so in so many words, he’s spent his whole life listening to his father saying the word like it’s the only thing that matters and everything else is a clank to be repurposed, ridden into battle or scrapped for parts. But he’s also spent his whole life listening to his mother tell him about the normal people, the ones who are afraid to see monsters in their streets, telling him that they’re important too. At the age of fourteen he suddenly, bewilderingly, becomes an orphan, and without a parent on either side of him he feels even more in the middle: too compassionate to be recognizably Heterodyne within Mechanicsburg, too Heterodyne to be anything but a monster outside of it. At least he can take comfort in sharing this status with his brother: even if Bill’s sometimes leading him by the hand, at least they’re together.

* * *

Months pass, full of razing and restructuring and reforming, before Barry and Bill can feel safe leaving Mechanicsburg. They enroll at Transylvania Polygnostic University, together even though Barry is two years younger. They sit huddled in the back of their classes, trying to look mild and inoffensive and tamping down their Sparks in a class full of other Sparks in the hopes that nobody else will transfer classes or drop out altogether and flee Beetleburg. It’s a sharper kind of loneliness than in Mechanicsburg, with its polite distance broiling hot underneath. But time and patience begin to wear down the edges of their isolation: within a few weeks they have Klaus Wulfenbach sitting between them in the back row of Intro to Manipulating Magnetic Fields like they aren’t hereditary enemies, and not much longer after the attention of a couple of professors who have deemed them more interesting than dangerous. Dr. Beetle eventually stops sending reminders about the availability of the bell jars on the campus lawn. Barry still can’t help but want more, and he thinks he sees this desire reflected in his brother, too.

Several months pass, and Bill suddenly invites Zsófia Kovács back to their apartment. She’s someone he and Barry are both fond of: a smart and strongly-Gifted classmate who’s also really fun to debate with and who actually looks like she means it when she smiles and says “hello”. Barry’s excited to get to know her for all of five minutes, before his enthusiasm dips enough to pick up on the awkwardness in the conversation, and the way that it’s centered on him. Bill glances at him, wearing a look that unmistakeably says, _Get out_. So Barry takes a walk. He’s not sure how he feels; he’s happy for Bill, sure, but there’s something melancholy in there: he hadn’t really understood his brother after all.

Bill and Zsófia only last a few weeks, but he goes on to have other girlfriends, once their classmates start feeling secure in the assumption that they aren’t going to be turned into test subjects. Barry learns quickly to keep a respectful distance, but Bill sees him watching once and, with a grin that’s too reminiscent of a Jäger, punches him on the shoulder and reassures him that he’ll get his turn soon. Bill doesn’t understand: Barry isn’t worrying or even jealous, he’s just trying to understand the way that Bill feels, with a strange feeling of detachment that he finds very unlike the passion of the Spark. Later, Barry experiments with dating – _experiments_ , with hypotheses and precise methods and lots of notes. He concludes that classmates can make fun lab partners, that kissing holds no particular appeal, and that he sees no useful distinction between dating and friendship. He concludes that this is one of the times when he should just sit back and wait to catch up to Bill.

By the time he’s ready to graduate, Barry is willing to conclude that it may not be a matter of catching up.

* * *

 The possibility that he may be missing something nags at Barry when he and Bill return home to Mechanicsburg after graduation. He knows Mechanicsburg will take some getting used to, when it’s so different from Beetleburg in so many ways. It does offer him a perspective he’d almost forgotten: in Mechanicsburg, no one cares particularly who you fall in love with, even if the answer is no one. Still, Barry is a Heterodyne, and Heterodynes have expectations: he’s reminded of this within a day of returning, when he and Bill are accosted by a pack of Jägers who herd them into Mamma Gkika’s with the sort of efficiency they usually reserve for campaigns. Over a round of drinks, they offer Bill praise and commentary regarding his relationships and pry for details of the sort that spies don’t pass around. And they offer Barry advice. Lots of advice. Delivered in tones that are probably meant to be reassuring, but with cockeyed grins that are enough to make Barry squirm. Subtlety is lost on Jägers and they’re blocking the door (and grabbing a death ray off the trophy wall is a little _less_ subtle than Barry wants), so he tries deflection. He wastes time before the nightly bar-fight by engaging the couple sitting nearest him in a circuitous argument about the benefits of staying in the lab versus going on dates that leaves them shaking their heads at the priorities of Sparks and lets the rest close in around Bill. He excuses himself right before the chairs start flying. He stands in the street and isn’t even done drawing in breath for a sigh of relief when he hears the Castle’s voice in his ear, saying sneeringly that his ancestors had found romance and lab-work eminently compatible and offering him some useful _enhancements_ …

* * *

Barry and Bill get into adventuring almost accidentally. It’s nothing more than coincidence that they happen to be visiting Klaus when his town is attacked (by someone completely unaffiliated with Mechanicsburg, though his parents take some convincing), and _of course_ they offer to help the Wulfenbachs with their defenses: it would be rude not to! And when, a month later, they hear that the citizens of Zumzum are having trouble with the local Spark’s creations getting loose and running roughshod over the area, they come in to help (and to teach said Spark some control); it’s the least they can do to make up for the way that their ancestors raided the city every couple of years. And so it goes. For Barry and Bill, who have spent their lives struggling against the burden of their bloody legacy, the realization that there is far more chaos in the world than the Heterodynes and their monsters, that they can effect change independent of Mechanicsburg, is revelatory. It’s an opportunity and a responsibility, and they take it.

Adventuring means a lot of things. It means helping people. It means doing something important. It means that Barry gets to let loose his Spark in a way he’s never quite allowed himself to do before. It sometimes means fun. It also means allies. Friends. Bill is always by his side, but often they have company: just Klaus and Punch and Judy at first, then they start to meet people and their group of companions grows: Sulimân al-Sinhâjî, Thundering Engine Woman, Zzxzm… wherever they go, they meet someone.

Adventuring also means a new kind of enemy. Lucrezia Mongfish is a hostile Spark from a line of Sparks almost as notorious as the Heterodynes. Right away she seems interested in them – mostly in Bill, whom she kisses and then pushes into a death trap, but Barry feels like she’s interested in their ideology, too, even as she resists their attempts to talk her down. Bill is clearly interested in Lucrezia, too, but he puts it aside. In the end they decide by unspoken agreement to hold back and chase her back into her family’s arms (and lair) and are left with a lingering feeling that they could have done better. But Lucrezia turns up again and again, months later, embroiled in her own schemes or with her family, and it’s during one of those times that she unexpectedly turns around to fight _alongside_ Barry, Bill and Klaus, against her father. Barry has the distinct impression that he’s witnessing the latest episode of some sort of family power struggle rather than a genuine epiphany, but it’s something.

It’s more than something when Lucrezia appears, apropos of nothing, to save Barry and his brother from death by electrified cistern a couple of weeks later.

Bill and Lucrezia gravitate towards each other. Lucrezia only joins them on their adventuring occasionally, but her presence makes a clear difference to the group dynamics. She makes Bill happy. Very happy. Rather than withdrawing into his relationship, Bill becomes more open and enthusiastic with everyone. Constant adventuring is wearing, but her presence revives Bill and his energy revives everybody else. Barry gets just a little wistful seeing them together and he sometimes wonders if he is missing out on something after all. But he doesn’t dwell on it. And then, after a couple of months, Lucrezia leaves with Sparkhunds and hails of fire and confusion and carnivorous bees in her wake, and Barry is left to steady Bill and repair the damage. He decides that he spends enough time putting out fires as it is.

(When Lucrezia comes back and these stages of Bill and Lucrezia’s relationship prove to be cyclical, Barry is sure that he’s right.)

* * *

Somewhere along the line, after years and years of adventuring, Barry becomes aware that he and Bill are famous. Not infamous for their lineage, not even just famous enough to change the tone of the word “Heterodyne” from fear to respect: famous, as in stories passed down from traveler to traveler until they come back to him almost unrecognizable. Famous, as in learning that he and his brother are spoken of all over Europa as “The Heterodyne Boys”. Famous as in _plays_ , a couple of them. (The likenesses of Barry and Bill’s adventuring companions are preserved in these stories, too, but with less prominence and even less care.) Barry hasn’t encountered the plays personally, but he hears: adventures that they’d mostly never had setting a backdrop for a not-entirely-inaccurate rendition of Bill and Lucrezia’s relationship melodrama (Bill laughs awkwardly), with Barry himself paired with crudely-caricatured versions of his friends on the side. Barry has long since stopped caring to make excuses for himself, and he does not appreciate the storytellers for making excuses for him, or the reasoning he senses behind it – that romance is a mandatory part of a hero’s list of accomplishments, that he is not interesting enough to tell stories about without it. He voices these thoughts to his friends, his brother, and doesn’t feel self-conscious about it.

* * *

Barry and Bill don’t go home to Mechanicsburg very often. Their work sends them chasing chaos all over the continent and beyond, and Mechanicsburg doesn’t really _need_ them – between the local geography, the Jägers, and the Castle it’s the most impenetrable city in Europa, and Carson von Mekkhan is a perfectly capable administrator, even if he once served under Barry’s father. But circumstance sometimes forces their hand. When a fight against a Spark with an army of seismic clanks and giant rock scorpions goes badly, Bill is left with several broken bones, a severe concussion, and a poisoned bite wound which within minutes results in a severe infection that leaves his skin worryingly gelatinous. They’re close enough to Mechanicsburg that when Bill’s stabilized Barry commandeers the Spark’s airship to take him to the Great Hospital while the rest of the group handles cleanup. Barry alternates his time between Bill’s bedside and catching up on Mechanicsburg’s affairs on his brother’s behalf.

When, less than two days into his staying in Mechanicsburg, Barry rounds a corner and finds his way blocked by a gaggle of Jägers, anticipating his arrival and already leering at him in an all-too-familiar way, he doesn’t have the patience to be circumspect. Before any of them have a chance to get a word in, he snaps that he’s not interested in whatever it is they have to say, because he’s not _lacking_ in dates or romance or sex, he just doesn’t care and never has. There’s a precarious moment of silence and exchanged glances which Barry takes in defiantly, and then, abruptly, they snap back into grins and chatter as money changes hands. Jorgi, who’s standing closest, claps Barry on the shoulder and tells him he should’ve said so sooner, looking more approving than admonishing, and Barry is annoyed and relieved at the same time. He doesn’t stay for drinks, but the few minutes’ conversation that follows, about Bill’s injuries and Barry’s recent run-in with the Torchmen, is blessedly uncomplicated and Barry actually walks away smiling.

He doesn’t think about who else might have been listening.

* * *

The other major reason why Barry and Bill don’t spend much time in Mechanicsburg is the Castle. The Castle does not approve of its Heterodynes being heroes, not in the least because it sees them as endangering the family line, and it likes to express its frustration in the form of “easy” traps and persistent, invasive questions. Its approval of Lucrezia as a consort means impatient inquiries as to what Bill is waiting for, culminating in snide remarks – delivered to Bill’s bedside – suggesting that _surely_ one of the supposedly world-class medical Sparks that he and Barry had taken such trouble to hire for the Hospital is competent enough to _cure impotence_. Barry gets his own snide remarks, but for the moment he’s not as easy a target. Barry doesn’t think about the Castle’s silence until it speaks. The Castle coolly tells him that if he isn’t interested in picking out a consort for himself it will be happy to do it for him. Has he considered that Lucrezia Mongfish has sisters?

Barry ignores comments in this vein over the next hour as the Castle decides he’s fun to pick on after all. By the time Barry has reached the hallway outside of Bill’s hospital room, the Castle has worked itself up into saying that it might just lock Barry in the seraglio with every compatible person within raiding distance if he continues to stall. Before Barry himself can even react, Bill, who had deemed the jabs aimed at him not worth the energy of acknowledgement, who Barry hadn’t even realized was awake and within hearing range, yells back that if the Castle ever threatens his brother again he’ll _tear up its sub-systems_ and _melt its body to slag!_ Even in his exhaustion, he dredges up enough Spark to make his threat sound very serious.

The Castle shuts up.

The incident must stay in Bill’s mind, because the next day he lays a bandaged hand on Barry’s shoulder and tells Barry, sharply and seriously, that there’s nothing wrong with him and that he, Bill, will always have Barry’s back. Barry knows that, right?

Barry knows. Barry knows that there’s nothing wrong with him, that he’s not missing something important. He’s known for a while now. And Bill’s support is one thing he’s always had.

But it’s still nice to hear.


End file.
